SOJALS rating:

Unrated (0/5)

I first read this in February 1997.

Adele de Montgarde is the astrophysicist who initiated the project to rekindle Earth's dying Sun. She's hibernated in frozen sleep for the past two hundred and has now awoken to see the culmination of her work.

The Sun project appears to be developing nicely, but over the past few years there have been some other problems. A dangerous alien-hating demagogue named Jephthath has stirred up anti-alien hatred across the Empire. Since the only currently-known alien race are the Sarpan, and Adele is rather fond of them, this is good neither for her nor the Sun project, nor the indeed the Empire, which considers Sarpan allies.

This is a sequel to "To Save The Sun". Rather luckily, I think, I read this sequel first and therefore have no need to read the earlier book. Had I started with "To Save The Sun" I might have ended up buying and reading "To Fear The Light", which would, in my view, have been a mistake.

It rolls along in a largely-trivial way, it's got a potentially exciting plot and at the beginning I thought I could put up with the writing. When will I learn? Probably never. For years I've bought Bova's books as emergency reading when other books are in short supply. On the other hand, Bova's writing really is improving - I enjoyed one or two of them (something about Mars, I think, I'll have to check my reviews).

What's it got? Well, wormhole faster-than-light travel, aliens sprouting from the woodwork by the dozen, largely friendly.